José Manuel Prieto, translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen in the New York Review of Books
(And no, I don't know why an article datelined May 26, 2011, three weeks and change into the future, is in "archives".)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/may/26/havana-state-retreats/?pagination=false
...
I’m amazed, for example, by the amount of street food one can buy, in contrast to the hungry years of the so-called Período Especial that began in 1991. Along the Calle San Rafael, in the city’s historic center, I count at least ten food stands, most of them doing business in Cuban pesos. Yes, prices are quite high; yet the markets are well stocked (by Cuban standards) and there are buyers, even at prices that are prohibitive for much of the population. The private grocers, along with the state stores that sell at “liberated” market prices, have made the arduous task of feeding oneself and one’s family somewhat less difficult. The country imports 80 percent of what it consumes, at a cost of almost $2 billion per year. In 2007, the government began to parcel out fallow land for individual farming, nearly three million hectares of it, almost half of the country’s farmland. Still, as the young Cuban economist Pavel Vidal Alejando noted in an interview in the magazine Espacio Laícal, “the dissolution of the centralized state system’s monopoly on agricultural commercialization” has yet to be achieved. It is this factor of state subsidy—and not underdevelopment or hurricanes—that keeps Cuban campesinos from filling the stores with produce.
Ration cards, it is announced, will soon be eliminated—a lifelong dream for many that finally seems to lie within reach. Not because the economic bonanza of Developed Socialism has allegedly been achieved (as happened in the USSR, where, we were told, there were no libretas, or ration cards) but because the state by now has hardly anything to distribute. The bodega I pass by every morning, which has a working public phone I use to make calls, is still as empty as it would have been during my childhood, when my mother had to work miracles to stretch out the permanently insufficient quota of rationed bread.
...
The other policy all Havana is talking about consists of layoffs. The government is going to eliminate 500,000 jobs by the end of 2011 and up to 1.3 million over the subsequent three years. When I read this news in New York it frightened me, but in Cuba I’m struck by two things. First, among all the people I talk to—friends, former classmates, people I meet in the street—no one is currently working for the state. I even speak to a doctor who resigned from her job in order to owe nothing to the state and be able to emigrate when she could (a punitive five-year delay is imposed on working doctors who express a desire to leave).
Second, I sense no great anguish about the layoffs, perhaps because it doesn’t make much sense to talk about “layoffs” in a situation where salaries are symbolic at best. The meager salary paid by the state, $15 to $20 per month, is almost valueless. In an economy where a cell phone costs $40 a month and there are a million cell phones in use, it’s clear that money is coming from somewhere besides the state. A friend told me he sees the layoffs “as a relief” and also as “an opportunity for many people.” “This is the point where the state will stop meddling and finally allow us to earn a living.” It will be riskier, but it will also mean living in greater freedom.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
